John McAfee listens to a question during an interview in Guatemala City on Dec. 4. / Moises Castillo, AP

by Romina Ruiz-Goiriena, Associated Press

by Romina Ruiz-Goiriena, Associated Press

GUATEMALA CITY (AP) - A lawyer for John McAfee said Tuesday a judge has ordered the software company founder released from a Guatemalan detention center where he has been fighting being returned to Belize.

Lawyer Telesforo Guerra said the judge notified him verbally of the ruling, but added that it may take a day for formal written notification to win McAfee's release, possibly as soon as Wednesday.

Guerra said Secaida ruled that McAfee's detention was illegal, ordered him released, and gave him 10 days to put his immigration situation in order. It was not immediately clear if McAfee could get some kind of temporary or transit visa to allow him to leave Guatemala.

He has said that he wants to return to the United States with his 20-year-old Belizean girlfriend. Guerra agreed that that would be his best option.

"For me, it's best that McAfee go to the United States, that's definitely the country where he will be safest," Guerra said. "In Guatemala, he runs the risk that anything could happen to him."

McAfee was detained last week for immigration violations after he sneaked into Guatemala from neighboring Belize. He had been on the lam for weeks before that, avoiding Belizean police who want to question him in the fatal shooting in November of a U.S. expatriate, Gregory Viant Faull, who lived near his home on a Belizean island.

McAfee acknowledges that his dogs were bothersome and that Faull had complained about them, but denies killing Faull. Faull's home was a couple of houses down from McAfee's compound in Ambergris Caye, off Belize's Caribbean coast.

In a live-stream Internet broadcast Sunday from the Guatemalan detention center where he is fighting a previous government order that he be returned to Belize, the 67-year-old said he wants to return to the United States and "settle down to whatever normal life" he can.

"I simply would like to live comfortably day by day, fish, swim, enjoy my declining years," he said.

McAfee is an acknowledged practical joker who has dabbled in yoga, ultra-light aircraft and the production of herbal medications. He has led an eccentric life since he sold his stake in the software company named after him in the early 1990s and moved to Belize about three years ago to lower his taxes.

He told The New York Times in 2009 that he had lost all but $4 million of his $100 million fortune in the U.S. financial crisis. However, a story on the Gizmodo website quoted him as describing that claim as "not very accurate at all."

Faull's family has said through a representative that McAfee's skillful courting of the media, including blog posts, email messages clandestine interviews, has obscured the main point, that McAfee should submit to police questioning.

Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All
rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.